I've cleaned up the sheep skull, and it now is on my shelves in my room. I'm going to write more about it later. I never found the other horn or the other part of the jaw, which is a shame, even though Daddy went back to try and find them. It would have been great if we had all the bits. But it's still the best sheep skull I have, and I have four.

This is me and my friend Innes this evening coming out of one of my favourite woods, where there are roe and red deer. We found a roe deer buck skull with six points (I'm holding that), a red deer stag skull with very soft antlers (Innes is holding that), and a red deer stag skull with four points on one antler and two on the other, which you can't see because my daddy was holding it and he was taking the picture. Most of the six-pointer was buried and we had to dig out of the ground and it took my daddy ages.

We have to share the skulls but we haven't decided who is having which ones yet.

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What you can see in the picture above is a red deer skeleton that we found on a walk last night. (We've called it Alice). We know it's a young female, but we still have to do a proper look at the bones. There are 157 bone pieces altogether, but some of those are from big bones that are broken, and some of those are tops and bottoms of bones that in older deer are joined together.

This post is rated
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. If you are a grown-up or if you are in the middle of eating dinner, you might want to stop reading now !

This week the weather has been better, so after school I have been on two bone walks again. Two days ago I went a bone walk to Tam Breck wood with daddy. My dad saw a roe buck but it ran away fast do I didn't see it, and further on we saw two roe in the fields. Then we found this rabbit skull.

The first bones I collected were rabbit bones, and I still collect them if they're good enough. I have about ten rabbit skulls, and it's really easy to find lots of them, but not many are in good condition like this with all the teeth, the nose bones, and the brain case. That's because whatever kills them, like a fox, often bites the skull as well.

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Daddy and I were planning to go on a deer stalking walk today, but it was raining, so Daddy said maybe I could put one of my old deer skeletons together. I was going to do a baby roe deer skeleton, but we couldn't find all the spine bones, so we did this adult roe deer instead (we call it Eddie).

While put the bones back together in the right order, Daddy set up of his cameras to take a picture every few seconds. When we put all the pictures together it looked like this:

You can see how I sorted out the bones. There were 66 bones for this roe deer, which seems like a lot, but it's not a complete skeleton, and most of these were the ribs and vertabrae. When we found the skeleton, most of the front legs were missing, and there are other bones, like the toes, which we brought back but must have put in a different box. I started with the spine first, putting a wire through the bones so they all stayed together in the right order.

About me

I'm Jake McGowan-Lowe and I am a bone collector, naturalist, blogger and author as seen on BBC's The One Show, Autumnwatch, Winterwatch, CBBC Wild, Newsround and BBC Breakfast.

I've appeared on the BBC alongside such experts as Sir David Attenborough, Chris Packham, Nick Baker and Ben Garrod. BBC Wildlife Magazine says I'm one of the 50 most influential conservationists in the UK, and The Courier ranked me as the 24th most influential person in 2015.

I am fourteen years old, and I live in a beautiful part of Scotland. I love walking, exploring, watching wildlife and collecting bones. I've been collecting bones since I was six, and I blogged here every week between July 2009 (when I was seven) until February 2016, when I took a break.

You can read more about why I began blogging here, and my advice to other kids wanting to blog here.

Jake's Bones: The book !

Like this blog ? Buy the book ! This blog and my collection led to a book deal for a brilliant childrens' book published by Hachette Children's. It's now been published in the UK, Ireland, the USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands (called Het Grote Bottenboek van Jake) and South Korea.

It was even shortlisted for the prestigious Royal Society 2015 Young Person's Book Prize !

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Me in the news

There have been stories about me in The Times, the Daily Telegraph Magazine, the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday,The Sun, Scotland on Sunday, the Sunday Mail, the Dundee Courier, the Perthshire Advertiser, the Stirling Observer, onBBC Radio Scotland, on the STV news, and I've even been on CBBC Wild, CBBC Newsround, The One Show, BBC Autumnwatchand Winterwatch !